Archive for June, 2008

Enjoyed this story on using social tools to reduce email. I keep failing back into old email habits. Chat, blogs and wikis are not only more effective for communicating, they are also much more productive.

Having grown entirely sick of the negative coverage on Vista (how could Microsoft have let it get so bad?) it was great to see Gizmodo present a more balanced view on Vista features. Vista is a big step forward over XP. For me its all about:

Arguably the best search features of any OS.

Immediate start-up. The continuing broken record on slow start-up is garbage. I’ve got two systems running Vista – I touch the keyboard and my XPS-One is on. I open my M1330, swipe my finger across the reader, and its on. And they’ve been up and running for months.

Fast. You’re nuts if you aren’t buying at least 2gb of RAM for your notebook. And for the small additional cost, go to 4.

Office runs better. And Office is better on Vista than any other platform. Period.

Looks great.

Media Center is an awesome DVR and brilliant addition.

I agree that there are still problems. Just as there are problems with OSX. They are about on par when it comes to Wireless networking – which remains a pain at times on both platforms. And I wish I had more control over Windows Explorer.

To be honest I actually hadn’t seen these in real life until I turned up at our morning news meeting and the team was doing a show and tell. They look amazing – the colors are gorgeous.

The implementation of the software dock is very cool. At first I viewed it as a knock-off of the Apple dock but it does a few more things by enabling a single icon to act as a navigator to multiple apps.

FT features Dell in a piece on Social Media… good read. Folks often ask me about the ROI of social media, this starts to get at it. Bottom-line, making customers happier through better access to information reduces costs and boosts sales.

This is a two-fold opportunity for tech vendors. By adopting a greater quotient of Web 2.0 marketing techniques, marketing executives can rise to the demands of what buyers want for information that adds to their purchase intelligence. At the same time, executives can demonstrate that they can take money off the table, by deploying less expensive marketing techniques. And every marketer’s chief operating officer or chief executive would applaud initiatives to reduce versus expand budget.

One of the biggest trends in marketing is using social media and social networking both to increase customer response time, authenticity, and to leverage communications. Many technology vendors are leading that charge and taking slightly different tacks to do so but all are seeing increases in positive brand association and customer engagement while decreasing both relative and total costs.

Frames are interesting things, and they get really interesting during a presidential election year. So, what to do when others are using language to frame you? One approach, call the frame and invert it. You turn the frame into a positive. It only really works when the original frame so clearly warrants questioning.

Here is a great example – Barack Obama told a group of Florida donors Friday night that Republicans will try to make voters afraid of him, and suggested they would use his race to scare up votes for John McCain,” Fox News reports:

“We know what kind of campaign they’re going to run. They’re going to try to make you afraid,” Obama said at the fundraiser. “They’re going to try to make you afraid of me. He’s young and inexperienced and he’s got a funny name. And did I mention he’s black? He’s got a feisty wife.”

The crowd of supporters cheered, and Obama added: “We know the strategy because they’ve already shown their cards. Ultimately I think the American people recognize that old stuff hasn’t moved us forward. That old stuff just divides us.”

By inverting the frame, he acquires sympathy and defines the opposition as “old stuff” – a nice little play… Messages are funny things. Especially when whacked about like this.